


So It Goes

by stepantrofimovic



Series: Opera fanfic [3]
Category: Don Carlos | Don Carlo - Verdi/du Locle/Méry
Genre: Blood and Gore, Love Confessions, M/M, What-If, overwrought operatic emotions, the character death is not the one you're prepared for, what is... the opposite of a fix-it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-05
Updated: 2020-04-05
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:27:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23476174
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stepantrofimovic/pseuds/stepantrofimovic
Summary: This is how it should go. There are two men who love each other, but not quite in the same way.This is not how it goes.
Relationships: Carlos | Carlo/Rodrigue | Rodrigo
Series: Opera fanfic [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1688206
Comments: 2
Kudos: 8





	So It Goes

**Author's Note:**

> In case you're asking, this was brought about by this week's Met online production. I would like to extend my thanks to Simon Keenlyside for playing this already extremely gay story even gayer, and to Verdi for pouring all his nationalistic feelings into homoerotic narratives.

This is how it should go. There are two men who love each other, but not quite in the same way. One of them loves his friend, but he also loves another, and he loves the other more, and differently, and his friend knows. His friend loves him, and loves him more than anything, and his friend doesn’t know, and that’s okay. Or, at least, that is how it is.

This is how it should go. The man who loves his friend more than anything will offer himself in exchange for his friend’s life. He will go to him, and tell him, and be thanked, and declare his love, and not be heard. There will be an assassin – dressed as a monk, or more likely an actual monk, because the King and the Church are one these days. The assassin will shoot. The man who loves his friend more than anything will die. If he’s lucky, he’ll die in his friend’s arms. He knows he will ask to be held, because he’s not that strong, not after all of this.

After his death, his friend will take up their cause and bring it to triumph, build a monument in Flanders to the man who loved him and have him remembered as a hero; or maybe he will die the following day, killed by his father’s guards in front of the woman he loves more than anything. Rodrigo doesn’t know which one it will be in the end, but he knows this is how it should go.

***

This is not how it goes.

***

Rodrigo finds Carlo where the King’s guards are keeping him. He expects anger at his betrayal, but all he finds is an empty husk of his friend, tired, despondent, defeated. It takes Carlo a moment to understand what Rodrigo is saying about the King finding compromising papers about their Flemish plans – that Rodrigo has simply given himself up in Carlo’s stead.

When he understands, Carlo’s gaze changes. He’s not prostrate any more, he’s determined. This is what Rodrigo wanted, even if it makes him uneasy. This is his victory, as much as he’ll allow himself one.

As if on cue, that’s when the assassin shows up. Rodrigo sees him, and sees the gun, and turns, and braces for the pain.

Rodrigo has been shot before, although not fatally, of course. He knows the peculiar way it hurts, different from a blade, red-hot pain spreading through your body rather than the cold punch of being stabbed. Then, again, he doesn’t know how it feels when the shot kills you. It’s selfish, but he hopes he has time to say goodbye. He will beg and bargain if he needs to, though he doesn’t know with whom.

The shot comes, but the pain does not. For a moment, Rodrigo wonders if this is just what happens when you’re shot to death. If he’s just out of time, and there won’t be any tearful goodbyes after all. He would rather not die like that. Then he opens his eyes, and Carlo is there.

The second it takes Rodrigo to realise that Carlo jumped in front of the bullet is the second it takes for his friend to fall to the ground. Rodrigo is barely fast enough to catch him. The moment he does, he can hear Carlo’s breath gurgling in his throat, can feel the blood seeping through his doublet and into his own hands, and he knows there’s nothing to do.

This is not how it was meant to go.

Rodrigo holds frantically onto his friend as his body goes slack too fast. Carlo isn’t trying to speak, just looking at him, as if that’s enough, somehow. When he manages to get the question out, Rodrigo almost chokes on it.

“Why? My friend,” _my love,_ “why?”

Carlo’s eyes are smiling, even though his face can’t muster the strength anymore. “You… love me. You wanted –” his breath catches and rasps, and Rodrigo can barely hear him over his own choked sobs – “to die for me.”

He nods frantically. _Then why didn’t you_ let _me?_ But Carlo stops him with a shaky hand over his mouth. Rodrigo grabs it and holds it there, kisses Carlo’s palm desperately, not minding the blood he can now taste on his tongue.

“I…” Carlo struggles to draw breath, gritting his teeth through the pain. “I love you. Too. To death.” He still tries to breathe in, tries to say more, but there’s no air in his lungs, and his face is a mask of frantic pain when he stops trying.

Rodrigo doesn’t know how long he sits there, cradling his friend’s body in his lap. He doesn’t know if the guards have stayed or left. He knows the King’s assassin doesn’t come back. He knows there is no King anymore, and no Flanders, no great plan, nothing but the man he loved.

***

This is how it goes. Rodrigo walks to the Queen’s chambers, and no one stops him. When he walks in, covered in blood up to his face – he can feel it drying on his lips, and he doesn’t care –, the lady in waiting screams and runs out to seek help. Elisabetta doesn’t.

Elisabetta stares at him as he comes closer, her face pale. “Carlo?” she asks, her voice thin, as if she needs to.

Rodrigo nods, as if he needs to. That’s when his knees finally give out under him.

He lies on the floor, and sobs until he can’t breathe, and he can barely feel Isabella’s arms around him but he holds on to her gown like the lifeline it isn’t. There will be a day for lifelines, a day for going to Flanders and for being someone else’s hero, and there will be a day for this to have meaning. Today, Rodrigo cries himself sick on a cold floor, covered in the blood of the man he loved, and who somehow loved him back.

**Author's Note:**

> Are my baritone-related feelings ready for Peter Mattei as Amfortas next week? Methinks not. Methinks I'll end up writing more fanfiction. (I also have at least another draft in the works for _Onegin_ , aka my favourite opera of all times, so watch this space, as they say.)


End file.
